60 Years Of The PMC: A New Contributor

2010 marks the 60th anniversary of the launch of the PMC. Yes, it's impossible to believe, but that's because it is impossible. To mark this auspicious occasion the PMC will be taking a retrospective of some of the outstanding posts of the past six decades. From Cold War to Coldplay and from Ban the Bomb to Ban the Burka, every decade will be represented, and includes highlights from some of the most talked about of contributors...Bertrand Russell, Hunter S. Thompson, Roman Polanski, Roald Dahl and Limahl from Kajagoogoo, to name but a few - none of them contributed to the PMC's pages (oh, hold on a second, Limahl had a regular section in the early 80s). 

January 1982 saw the arrival of a new contributor to the PMC. Benedict Francis-Kentigern, or BFK as he immediately became known, was a budding motoring journalist who had risen from the humble beginnings of Stowe public school and an old Austin Healey Sprite that his stockbroker father had bought him for his twelfth birthday, to become motoring correspondent here. He also worked for Motorsport magazine, and in fact was known for  merely scaling down his offerings there somewhat and simply posting them here.. as if any serious journalist would do such a thing. 
An early excerpt from his work, the then-never-popular 'BFK's week', shows us that the young BFK was no slouch when  it came to painting a vivid picture of his glamorous lifestyle without ever resorting to cliche..

First published on 1 July 1982..

Hi all - BFK here. I've just  been driving the new version of the XJS from Jaguar. It's got a lot more kick to it now, with a 5.3 V12 high efficiency engine which has squeezed out nearly a hundred more bhp than the old version, and you certainly feel it, as I did winding my way through the leafy lanes surrounding Great Missenden in my native Bucks. It was a cabriolet I was driving, and the moody looking clouds that were gathering over High Wycombe direction initially provoked a little bit of concern, before pulling over to close the automatic cloth top, which worked like a dream. Forunately I'd donned my best black roll neck Simon Templar jersey and was closing the window just as a hot looking brunette drew parallel with me, in a gold cabriolet Golf Gti. She fluttered her eyelids at me whilst I managed to half raise my eyebrow (using my finger to help). I was about to suggest coffee at a little hostelry I know nearby, before she let out a terrible estuary 'see ya, graaandad'..my goodness, it was none other than Lorraine Chase! I was tempted to give chase myself but decided to play it cool, easy enough to do when you're driving by far the smoothest thing to come out of Coventry, not that that is saying much. 
I was getting a bit peckish so pulled over in the next village to buy a Cadbury's finger of fudge and the latest issue of the 'classical composers partwork'. It was Shostakovich this time. Must remember to leave the LP and accompanying booklet on my glass coffee table, just in case Lorraine should pop round to borrow a cup of sugar. It'll make me look as sophisticated as Christopher Cazenove, almost.
I soon got stuck behind some old biddies in a Morris Minor, and it wasn't going to be easy to get round them on a single track lane in the Chilterns. I just chilled out, slapped on the latest Police album on the cassette player (which has an auto-reverse function and Dolby reduced hiss!) and let it all wash over me.
Back at the ranch, I ran a sponge-mop and some Flash over the black and white tiled hallway floor, which was designed for me by Terence Conran no less, before settling down to catch what little of Wimbledon the rain hadn't spoiled.
Plugging into my Acorn Electron and losing off a fax to New York, in which I propsed to run a few ideas up the flagpole with our American co-publishers, I felt a wave of satisfaction come over me. This is 1982 and anything is possible, especially with your truly involved, and I pushed my red rimmed specs up my nose with an air of smugness I'd seen on a recent episode of 'Triangle'.

Thought For The Day No. 43 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste...

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his/her spiritual being..[and] inner self. Whether or not he/she is actually present, whether or not he/she is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

I did not know whether my wife was alive, and I had no means of finding out...but at that moment it ceased to matter. There was no need for me to know; nothing could touch the strength of my love, of my thoughts, and the image of my beloved. Had I known then that my wife was dead, I think that I would still have given myself, undisturbed by that knowledge, to the contemplation of her image, and that my mental conversation with her would have been just as satisfying. 'Set me like a seal upon thy heart, love is as strong as death'.

Viktor Frankl

Transparent If Slightly Misted Estonia

Notwithstanding yesterday's post about the economic situation, I read some encouraging news today, or rather figures, concerning the Transparency International figures on corruption. As posted before, corruption is one of those buzz words which we hear a lot about, but in any case I think it's good to know that Estonia is as high as 26 (out of 178) just behind France and the US and ahead of Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and any baltic state beginning with 'L'.

Stick With The Winners On Our Side Of The Atlantic - Walt Gleeson

Canfield, Proctor, Nightingale, Zagler, Hill, Robbins, Tracy, Winfrey... step aside please..there's a new success guru in town! Walt Gleeson is a highly successful, internationally renowned author of motivational books and CDs and other products. Starting as a rust repairer on a sewage trawler in international waters, on one cent fifty per month, Walt soon rose to control the entire US fleet, and he never even graduated from High School. His career has spanned over half a decade, during which he has acted as advisor to such alumni as Richard Nixon, Oliver North and Mike Tyson, and he has enthralled readers all over the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Hawaii to Rhode Island, with such titles as You Can Do It!, You Can Do It! Too, Literally Make Your House Work For You, My Lai Was Just a Blip and Become a Billionaire Whilst On The Toilet, Walt is the Puumaja Crew's personal realization and fulfilment coach, whatever that is.

Walt has just returned from a trip to Europe..

Hello all, Walt here, I'm so glad to be back in the land of the free following my trip to the old country - Europe. The whole thing was a mixed bag of experiences I have to say.
First of all, the sheer poverty of the place. It's just everywhere. From the moment I got off the plane at Helsinki Vantaa airport, I could tell I'd arrived, if not in the third world then the second and a half world at the very least, from the tiny little cars to the  puny, emaciated kids, to the safe houses for Islamists to the criminal income tax rates and 'free' healthcare.

Struggling to find a McDonalds at the airport, all I had to make do with was something called 'Hessburger', which my wife Betty pointed out to me, sounds more like 'horseburger'! So I had to make do with an inferior European burger, not for the first time. Sure, the Europeans are big on their street cafes, at least in the southern part of the country, but many of these are just one offs, they're not part of a syndicated chain nor do they have any desire to be. Losers. The ingredients are these so called 'natural' products, made by, no doubt unwashed, hands, over an unacceptably long period of time, and it was difficult to find anything which contained corn syrup.

Many of the folks just don't seem to want to smile at you or wish you a nice day, either. I was treated with great rudeness at one of the hotels I stayed in in either Germany or Ireland, I don't remember which - they're so similar, and was asked curtly to 'please fill your name and address here and the porter will take your bags to your room'. Not a meaningless platitude or toothsome soft focus smile in sight


Then we get on to the legendary European cowardice. From the French resistance museum to the memorial to the landing of the British paratroopers at Arnhem, all one big mess of retreat and counter retreat until, thankfully, we came in and single handedly restored the Europe of our forefathers (I'm of Welsh-Sorbian heritage and my wife comes from an old Icelandic-Algerian family).

Once, whilst we were announcing to the entire restaurant that we were from the USA, we encountered an example of the legendary European stinginess, ordering a 'family size' plate of authentic European buffalo wings, it came on a plate, with a knife and fork, and not a bucket and spade!

I'm not saying that Europe doesn't have its good points - it does: the antique churches, domestic animals runing free in the streets, the beautiful girls, just waiting and praying for an American GI with a poorer command of the English language than they have to come and whisk them off to Little Cliff, West Dakota, it's a place with real potential some day to produce something really valuable and long lasting instead of the motley crue of composers, philosophers, writers, inventors, scientists, musicians, actors and sportspeople they've been churning out down the years...but I know where I hang my hat, and it'll always be here...stick with the winners!

Walt.

Thought For The Day No. 42 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

'That old law about an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind'.

Martin Luther-King

Travel Clichés

Some time ago I went on a writing course with a noted travel writer, who provided us with, amongst other things, a list of no-no clichés (see previous posts too)...

...so here are some of the most cringeworthy that you mind find in trave 'literature' - some of it might not even be directly taken from the canon of the Lonely Planet, Rough, and In Your Pocket guides and similar, but not much..

'snow-capped mountains'
'Majestic mountains'
'Lunar landscape'
'Narrow/winding cobbled streets'
'Perched on the hill/nestling in the valley'
'Like opening an oven door'
'Best kept secret'
'A land of contrasts'
'Where east meets west'
'The Athens of the North/Venice of the South'
'The real Borneo/Acapulco/Ulam Bator'
'In a time warp'
'Washed down with a glass of the local wine'

'Those wearisome adjectives of magnitude - big, great, vast, huge, tremendous, enormous, gigantic - which are nothing but emotive noises inviting the readers to do all the work. They are the plague of most travel books...'

...so there you go, I know some of our three  readers are budding travel writers and so hopefully this will have been 'food for thought' to coin another one..

New Flight Links To Tallinn

You will soon be able to get to (or escape from) Tallinn easier than ever; Ryanair are at long last hooking themselves up to the land of Kalev and, since the country is so small anyway, there is none of the usual landing at a disused world war one aerodrome a five hour journey away from the billed destination. They hope to shift 300,000 passengers per year through Tallinn airport, which will amount to a huge proportion of total throughput (for example in 2009, post downturn, a little over 1.3 million people, or rather 1.3 million passengers - some of whom could presumably be the same person travelling multiple times - went through Tallinn, curiously approximately the population of the whole country).

Thanks to the blue- and yellow-winged harp, Tallinn is going to be linked to Dublin, 'London' (acutally 'Luton aaiiirrrpawwt'), Dusseldorf, Edinburgh, Milan, Stockholm and Oslo, if any of those places grab you. Services start on 14th December (Dublin) though you're too late to have grabbed any special offers celebrating the event.

As if that were not enough, Sleazyjet are also upping their connections here, flying three times a week to and  from the laughably-named John Lennon airport in Liverpool, to join the existing Stansted service.

So now there's no excuse for the olds to not come and visit me...oh hang on, they're already coming next month...

With thanks to George Francis for drawing our attention to the news, via the Tallinn Property facebook page.

Remembering George Dawes

...he's not dead, was just reminiscing about shooting stars, here, and here.